In our regular melee game it's become accepted that Winter will be the dominant (only) season. Three of four players prefer Winter and our Martell player has reluctantly given up the seasonal fight.

The result of which is that now the Kings of Winter agenda ( "If it is Winter, any opponent with as many cards in hand as you, or more, must randomly discard a card from his or her hand at the end of the draw phase" ) has become an agenda with no down sides. Last game we played two of the players used it and it decimated hands. I fear next game the remaining two players will jump on the band wagon also.

Has anyone else experience this? In theory it could bring a melee to its knees - you'd need huge draw to keep anything in your hand at all! Ironically, the only player who may gain is Martell with cards like Darkstar benefiting from the discard.

Am I right to be worried about the proliferation of this agenda? Your thoughts, gentlemen.

My experience says that Greyjoy and Stark must play this agenda cause they have lots of good cards playing seasonal and moreover they limit opponent draw discarding after draw phase. Apparently no downside with this agenda.

I only play joust and the summer agenda is seeing less and less play in my meta. Seems that in melee the problem aggravates. Good to know that.

I haven't played enough melee to say for certain, but my impressions are that summer is still more popular in melee around here. Winter is good for a couple houses, but opponents typically dislike the -1 gold and loss of cards to the agenda, and so people will work together to remove the winter raven from play. In contrast, many players will let the summer raven stick around for +1 gold, so long as it doesn't seem to help the owner a ton. (Whereas someone will almost always trigger carrion bird's ability if there's a target, the player will often choose to remove an opponent's white raven over another player's carrion bird, etc. In contrast, most of the time I see players target carrion birds over black ravens, excepting people playing the winter agenda, of course.)

In joust, I think winter is much more common than summer. I agree that this has to do with the winter agenda, which generally lacks a downside. To some extent, I think it is also because winter compliments GJ so well, offering gold choke and strengthening hand removal (especially with Alanys in play) and character/location removal (marauders). Stark may also benefit from winter, but I haven't seen that many Stark decks taking full advantage of it...perhaps they will do a better job post-Stark box.

Summer, on the other hand, doesn't give much other than card draw. But when it comes to card draw, potentially drawing three with the risk of drawing 1 most games is probably worse than a guaranteed draw two (if you really need the draw), especially if it means that many of the cards you draw into will perform poorly during winter. In Targ, Followers are good with summer, but they are not as good as marauders when their season is out and are just as bad or worse when the opposing season is out. Given how common GJ winter is, summer seems like a pretty big liability for a bit of extra draw. Because Targ has chambers to help recur Black Raven though, you still see some summer Targ though.

Martell summer is similarly less common than GJ winter, but I do see it played. Other than Open Market, which few people seem to play, there's really only the Maester of the Sun and the draw that make summer attractive. Maester of the Sun alone is definitely strong but probably not worth playing summer just for a few saves, especially considering how many small characters Martell already plays that can be killed to satisfy claim. (So the Maesters really become most useful only when saving against targeted removal, which is still somewhat lacking in the current environment, and Valar.) The draw is nice, but once again, it becomes a huge liability when playing against winter; and unlike Targ, Martell can't recur the black raven attachments.

The problem is we play as Stark, Greyjoy, Baratheon and Martell. The Greyjoys and Baratheons both actively play the winter raven cards while the Stark doesn't but obviously has no problems when the others make it winter. Martell would prefer it to be summer but doesn't like the odds of making it, and keeping it, summer so doesn't.

So we currently have an almost permanent Winter. Last game two players realised this and played Kings of Winter. The other two I have no doubt will follow suit next game. That's four Kings of Winter agendas in all likelihood. Within a couple of rounds this is going to reduce hand sizes to nothing. It mightn't spoil the game, but I fear it may. If the Kings of Winter agenda kicked in at the start of the draw phase then it wouldn't be quite so bad, but it kicks in at the end of the draw phase.

We may try house ruling it, or banning it, or just seeing how it pans out. The jury is still out and I don't want to jump to any conclusions. I just wanted to gauge other players' opinions on what I think is potentially a flawed agenda. I'll report back on how it actually plays out if we do all run with it.

try targ summer, they have the attachment recursion to stop it from being winter easier against 2 winter decks, especially if the other non winter player(s) leave carrion bird in their deck.

Agree with Lars: i played a Targ Summer/War crest and did pretty well. Note that winter decks are there mostly to use and abuse some devastating effects...Summer is good simply as a gold/draw booster and a bunch of entertaining stuff...In that targ build, I used to get early summer in order to activate recursion/lock as soon as I could. Then, in the long run, you can take advantage from Red Warlock or something...

I was also testing a Bara summer splahed with shadows and it's a nice aggro-control concept.

Winter is pretty awesome, but I hate Greys and aside stark (I usually don't play winter with them), I like it a lot with Lannis...

In the end, I tend to consider summer/winter mostly as a tactical/psicological advantage/factor, rather than a basic mechanic to build decks around.

We mostly play multiplayer. And we had the problem of multiple kings of winter at the same time. I'm not sure we played it right, but hand denial was as its best... and game fun was at its worse. Since nobody was planning to run a summer deck, to try to compete the omnipresence of winter, we decided to casually ban the Kings of Winter agenda altogether. Our main complaint was: the summer agenda can't compete against the winter one, its drawback is just too harsh compared to a drawback-less winter agenda.

I've never had this problem. Unless I'm missing something though, won't three players running this agenda during winter mean that if each player begins the draw phase with no cards they will end the draw phase with no cards? That certainly does seem like an unfun game situation.